Learning

Besides just reading books and manuals, I like to read about the history and development of a technology. I find it tends to provide insight on why something works the way it does.

>How did you learn programming?
Going to university when I was 21

>What was your personal experience?
I had almost none beforehand.

Bought the Principles and Practice C++ Book when I was 16 and fucking devoured the thing.

Reading source code without additional resources.

holy shit this. reading the source code of a program and playing around with it is one of the fastest ways to understanding a language and how it interacts on a larger scale. reading about functions and pointers and references isn't gonna do shit if you don't know how to use them together

I toyed around with python and Java when I was a NEET then decided to enroll in college as a CS major. Now in my Junior year and I love programming.

automate the boring stuff with python and fucking around with stuff and automating them. for example, i wrote a script that executes ffmpeg on all my flacs and puts them in mega folder. i sync those encodes with all my devices and shit. it was fun and now i don't spend as much time autistically tagging and reencoding everything.

void goodprogrammer(){
Boolean imagudprogramer=book.hasread();
Imagudprogramer?goodprogrammer:cout

>be 19
>go into uni, pick math and cryptography major
>turns out first few years is generic math
>shitty programming course in pascal, my first intro to programming
>professor literally tells us that most of us end up being programmers anyway, what a realistic opinion desu
>math in math major too boring, realizes it has no real world application outside academia unless I go through PhD, which I did not want to
>resign to software engineering (different uni as well), but courses were garbage. low quality uni. what a huge mistake I did
>forward 2 years
>wrote toy kernel, toy compiler, few network clients/servers/protocols, read books, did online courses alongside, grinded a lot outside the curriculum
>learned C, C++, Rust, Lisp, Go, SQL, Python, Erlang, Lua
>bachelor's degree in, got employment, learned even more but now with money
>afterwards, learned about cryptography in relation to computer protocols and high-performance computations. so even fulfilled my original passion.
>built up strong habbit of constantly learning new things and digging deeper into more complete understanding
things are doing fine desu. I've never had such strong passion for anything before.
prime time for my life.

Wanted to make games as a kid and made a shitty mario clone in construct